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We need not carry this matter further; we turn to a question
already touched but demanding still some brief consideration.
Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the all-important:
this- we read- is the grand learning, the learning we are to
understand, not of looking towards it but attaining, first, some
knowledge of it. We come to this learning by analogies, by
abstractions, by our understanding of its subsequents, of all
that is derived from The Good, by the upward steps towards it.
Purification has The Good for goal; so the virtues, all right
ordering, ascent within the Intellectual, settlement therein,
banqueting upon the divine- by these methods one becomes, to self
and to all else, at once seen and seer; identical with Being and
Intellectual-Principle and the entire living all, we no longer
see the Supreme as an external; we are near now, the next is That
and it is close at hand, radiant above the Intellectual.
Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch,
established in beauty, the quester holds knowledge still of the
ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very
crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and
sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with light,
but it is not a light showing some other object, the light is
itself the vision. No longer is there thing seen and light to
show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection; this is
the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intellectual
object into being for the later use and allowed them to occupy
the quester's mind. With This he himself becomes identical, with
that radiance whose Act is to engender Intellectual-Principle,
not losing in that engendering but for ever unchanged, the
engendered coming to be simply because that Supreme exists. If
there were no such principle above change, no derivative could
rise.
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